Leadership Quote by Michael D. Higgins

Higgins’s sentence is an exercise in calibrated modesty that still manages to set an agenda. “I hope” and “of some” lower the temperature, the kind of hedging that signals humility while quietly establishing criteria by which a presidency should be judged. It’s not “I will transform the nation,” but it is a plea for a verdict: measure me by whether I widened the circle.

The phrase “at home… inclusiveness” matters because the Irish presidency is largely ceremonial; its real power is symbolic and moral. Higgins frames that symbolic role as a domestic project first: knitting together a country with long-running fault lines around class, religion, the legacy of violence, and a rapidly changing social landscape shaped by immigration and liberalization. “Inclusiveness” is a soft word with hard political edges, implying who has historically been excluded without naming culprits. That restraint is the point. It invites recognition rather than defensiveness.

Then he pivots “abroad” to “representing Ireland,” a reminder that small states live and die by narrative. The subtext is that Ireland’s image is an asset to be stewarded: modern, open, culturally confident, not trapped in cliché or grievance. “Look forward” adds a note of energetic service, but it’s also a claim about the presidency’s job description: to be a diplomat of values, not merely a ribbon-cutter.

Set against the seven-year term, the line reads like a mission statement delivered as a personal hope, a politician’s way of making a promise without sounding like one.